strange moments
Boyd & Evans: Landmarks, exh cat., Milton Keynes Gallery, 2005
‘Although the dream is a very strange phenomenon and an inexplicable mystery, far more inexplicable is the mystery and aspect our minds confer on certain objects and aspects of life. Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies…’ Giorgio de Chirico, ‘On Metaphysical Art’ 1919[1]
Boyd and Evans’s new photographic works subtly disrupt our expectation and understanding of the photographic image, and thereby our looking. In one of the most compelling of these recent works, Warm Springs (2003), we are presented with what seems at first glance to be a banal image of a swimming pool. The pool itself is positioned centrally within the image. There is a bathing hut at the far end of the pool, two handrails dip into the water on the left. The surface of the water is calm, undisturbed. But the edges of the pool are ragged and overgrown. Weeds overhang the water. The pool is fenced off and, strangely, appears to be located within an empty and featureless desert landscape. Stranger still is the fact that the surroundings are black and white and the only part of the image that is in colour is the water in the pool, which glows a weird, chemical, turquoise blue. It seems to be irradiated with an intense and unnatural colour. Yet herein lies a paradox; for if one were to journey to the western end of the Extraterrestrial Highway in southern Nevada and locate the site in which this photograph were taken, one would see that the blue is the actual colour of the water. The original photograph has been altered, but only by removing colour from certain areas of the image. Yet this small change effects a transformation. The blue of the water glows more vividly than it would normally and the scene is rendered intensely strange.
In another recent work, Façade (2003), the stepped frontage of a boarded up building appears to have been washed with watercolours in delicate tints of blue and lilac. The colours are luminously beautiful. And indeed it seems that, contrasted with the monochrome surroundings, the trees on either side and the stretch of gravel road in the foreground, the building has somehow been lit from within, becoming ethereal, extraordinary. In Zurich Station (2003) a crumpled iron tank of some kind, a sculptural mass of metal, sits on a rise in the desert surrounded by debris, its form recalling a Futurist head of Mickey Mouse, ruined, decayed, adrift and apart in the desert expanses of America. Potash Blue (2004) depicts a panoramic view of a man-made lake surrounded by mountains and again only the water is coloured. These scenes are all in America and, except for a few works in which anthropomorphic rock formations or cacti are picked out in colour, the focus of all these new images are marks or relics – landmarks - made on and in the landscape by man.
Boyd and Evans’s new photographic works suggest a shift in their practice yet are in many ways entirely consistent with their earlier work. While they are best known as painters, photography has been an integral part of their practice for over thirty years. The technique used in the Colour in Black and White works is new but there are continuities in both subject and method with the paintings they have been making (and continue to make) since 1968. They are an extension of an engagement with the seemingly empty spaces of the American south-west, with a kind of subtle Surrealism, particular kinds of images, with ways of looking at the world.
Yet in other ways these new works are different. In their paintings, the dramatic focus is often on a figure or figures and the relationship they might have with one another and the place in which they are located; possible narratives. These new photographs are unpeopled, filled only by artefacts and echoes; odd places, tools, wreckage; signs of abandonment and emptiness. They return again and again to signifiers of decay and entropy. Boyd and Evans have said that they are interested in the ‘raw wilderness’ of America, and in particular what happens when it ‘rubs up against man.’[2] In these new works the friction, the dereliction resulting from this confrontation is made explicit.
Surrealism and Painting
One of the defining features of Boyd and Evans’s work is their interest in Surrealism. This influence is perhaps clearest in their early works; in paintings such as Blink (1972), in which two figures asleep in a landscape are threatened by a flock of birds, or a number of works including Outside In (1975) or Evidence: Voices (1974) which employ the kind of visual paradoxes beloved of Rene Magritte. Yet in more recent paintings such as The Interpreter (1990) (which recasts Magritte’s La Reproduction Interdite (1937)) or Full Circle (1990) a Surrealist approach to imagery is still present; is perhaps even a guiding principle. And in these new photographic works the embracing of incongruity and the delight in the fortuitous or telling juxtaposition are deeply indebted to Surrealism, even if the works themselves are not, strictly speaking, Surrealist.
Their interest is not doctrinal, but is rather in the narrative potential revealed by the irrational, Surrealist juxtaposition of figures and locations, and thus the construction of possible scenarios. Boyd and Evans’s art has always been concerned with narrative.[3] They cite with approval Harold Pinter’s account of the genesis of The Caretaker, the realisation that two people in a room or a space inevitably suggest a relationship of some kind and thus a narrative situation, and they have used this principle throughout their careers.[4] In Story (1974), despite the title, there is no explicit narrative, no actual story. But one could, using the disparate elements of the painting, the setting, construct a number of possible situations or narratives, should one want to.
In order to construct such situations they began, in the late 1960s, to take photographs as source material, building up an archive of 90,000 slides which they describe as ‘our collective memory.’ Their early paintings used elements drawn from different images, collaged together, and were made with acrylic paint, spray guns and carefully cut templates. The use of collaged elements has continued to be at the heart of their artistic process, although the methods of realisation have shifted, primarily with the decision to use brushes rather than sprays in 1980 and then the decision in 1991 to work in oil. The fidelity with which they have been able to reproduce the surface appearance of their source material has led to the widespread and enduring misunderstanding that they are photo-realists. However, such effects have only ever a been side-product of their method, not the purpose of it. As they have said: ‘If Photoshop had existed, maybe we would never have taken up painting.’
The photo-realist label not only perpetuates a distortion of the aims of their art, but also of the means. This is a label that could only be used by someone who has seen their paintings in reproduction but not in reality. Their work is extremely ill served by reproduction. On the page, the images are transformed back into the source. Boyd and Evans have said that they began to work in paint merely as an expedient method for the presentation of ideas and situations but then fell in love with paint and the process of painting. This love is clearly evident in the post 1991 works which are very painterly; thickly impastoed, vigorously brushed; much involved with the matière of paint and the creation of painterly effects, painterly illusion. But in reproduction they revert to the condition of the photographic image; flat, immaculate, uninflected, untouched by hand or brush.
Magritte has often been cited as a key influence on Boyd and Evans, but the artist who, it seems to me, is closer to their aesthetic, is Magritte’s avowed master, Giorgio de Chirico.[5] De Chirico, whose streets and squares so often seem no more than settings for some extraordinary drama or spectacle which has either just happened or is about to happen; de Chirico, painter of interrupted narratives.
The American landscape lends itself to narrative (and particularly to interrupted narratives). America is, in Reyner Banham’s words, ‘…a society whose consciousness is built, ad hoc, out of scraps and junk. America, that surreal country, is full of found objects.’[6] For which we might read ‘found images’ or even what de Chirico called ‘strange moments’. It seems entirely appropriate that in these new works Boyd and Evans have used photography, ‘…the only art that is natively surreal…’ to address this extraordinary subject, to capture these moments.[7]
Looking, Seeing
Throughout their career Boyd and Evans have made an investigation of what might be called the conditions of sight and have celebrated that extraordinary faculty. Their early work makes almost a fetish of framing – windows are a recurring motif – and reveals an obsession with points of view. Note the number of works they have made in which sight and the activity of looking is made central, especially by titling: Point of View (1972), Looking Up (1972), View (1973), Looking Out (1974), Focus (1981), Vanishing Point (1987), Looking Up (1991), Looking In (2000).[8] It could be argued that the new photographs continue this process, that what they are about, over and above their explicit subject matter, is vision, looking.
The original impetus for the Colour in Black and White works was the disappointment felt in certain photographs which, it seemed to the artists, had completely failed to capture the extraordinary qualities of the scene photographed. For these works they took their colour photographs, scanned the transparencies, and then began a complex process of adjustment and calibration, removing the colour from the image in all but the area of focus. This apparently simple adjustment of the image magically transforms its impact.
Susan Sontag has written about what she calls ‘photographic seeing’ in terms which might be applied to these images. It is, she says, ‘an aptitude for discovering beauty in what everybody sees but neglects as too ordinary.’[9] She goes on to explain that: ‘Insofar as photography does peel away the dry wrappers of habitual seeing, it creates another habit of seeing: both intense and cool, solicitous and detached; charmed by the insignificant detail, addicted to incongruity. But photographic seeing has to be constantly renewed with new shocks, whether of subject matter or technique, so as to produce the impression of violating ordinary vision.’[10]
This is what Boyd and Evans do in these new works, they effect the renewal of ‘photographic seeing’ and charge it with the intensity of real experience. The Colour in Black and White technique suggests a revival of the sensation of looking, for the first time, at something striking, peculiar, out-of-the-ordinary. While ‘ordinary vision’ is not violated – which implies an act of aggression – it is punctured, and is thereby transformed.
Enchantment, Visions
Reviewing an exhibition of Boyd and Evans’s paintings in 1988 David Miller suggested that the figures in the paintings were ‘caught in (what appears to be) a state of absorption. Indeed, they seem to be enfolded by the reality they witness…’[11] We might imagine this as an apt description of the artists, confronted with the remote pool in Warm Springs or the ruined hippy trailer in Bombay Beach (2003).
Miller writes of the artists as seeking to disclose ‘an epiphanic moment of experience’ and in this, I think, he is absolutely correct. This is an apposite assessment of paintings as varied in content and technique and as chronologically distant as Looking Up (1972) and Soon (2003). But whereas previously the epiphanic moment focussed on a relationship between two or more figures within a picture – was, essentially, a narrative epiphany – in the Colour in Black and White images the emphasis has shifted. The disclosure now is of place. The focus is on the present location, the quality of presence, the sensation of hereness; of seeing, here, now. One could argue that in these new photographs the epiphanic moment has shifted from something constructed by the artists in the picture to the artists’ own seeing, their own experiences.
In the new works the moment of intensity the artists felt before the subject is conveyed by the treatment of the imagery; it recovers the sense of the numinous, the magical, the compelling oddness that the artists felt when they stood there, camera in hand, but which had vanished when they came to look at the image that they had produced. Photography cannot compete with reality, only picture it, offer a two-dimensional simulacra. Yet these pictures seem almost more real, sur-real, as well as surreal. They embody de Chirico’s ‘strange moments.’
The banality of rusted wreckage, a patched plaster wall, an old caravan. In these new works these things are transformed: the revelatory quality of the original viewing is restored, becoming, once again, otherworldly, enchanted, visionary.
[1] Giorgio de Chirico, ‘On Metaphysical Art’ 1919 in Herschel B Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley 1968
[2] Unless otherwise stated quotations are taken from conversations with the artists in September and October 2004
[3] They have said: “narrative” is the one label we accept without flinching.’
[4] ‘…I went into a room and saw one person standing up and one sitting down and a few weeks later I wrote The Room. I went into another room and saw two people standing up and I wrote The Caretaker…’ Harold Pinter, quoted in Boyd and Evans: Portrayal, exh. cat., Flowers East, London 1996
[5] David Sylvester wrote that de Chirico’s eye ‘invariably gravitates like an Expressionist movie director’s, towards the spectacular, picturesque, vertiginous viewpoint.’ Boyd and Evans, whether painting the rainforest or the roads of America, often fix their view in a similar way. David Sylvester, About Modern Art, p.209
[6] Susan Sontag, On Photography, Penguin, London 1979 p.89
[7] Sontag p.99
[8] A.S. Byatt has made the curious but accurate assertion that the figures in their paintings are somehow not part of the world in which they are depicted, but are ‘divided from it by a sill…’ This is true, of course, the figures are essentially collaged elements within the picture. But it does often seem as if we are looking at them through a window, and they are looking into the situation in which they find themselves through a second window, thus creating a layering of seeing. This is made explicit in many of the paintings cited but also in The Interpreter (1990), The Man and The Island (1990), The Small Divide (1991) and The Blue Cowboy (2003). See AS Byatt ‘Introduction’ in Boyd & Evans: Brunei Rainforest Project, exh. cat., Flowers East, London 1993
[9] Sontag p.69
[10] Sontag pp.51-52
[11] David Miller, ‘Boyd and Evans’ in Artscribe, Sept/Oct 1988, pp.77-78